Sony’s PlayStation Network is on its tenth day of outage after being hit by a malicious hacker (or hackers). The network reportedly went down on Wednesday night, April 20th with no real date from Sony as to when the system would be up and operating again. The PlayStation Network houses online multiplayer gaming for the company’s popular PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable platforms as well as serves as a digital media delivery service to the masses through Qriocity and other services.

“…we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained…While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility…”

Bad news for sure. So who exactly is this “unauthorized person”? Well, at this point, no one seems to know for sure, but theDepartment of Homeland Security, FBI and even Congress are on the case as well as wanting some answers from Sony itself. In the meantime though, many users are still left without their PlayStation Network and have begun to murmor, asking what Sony is going to do to make up to them the extended outage.

Have you been affected by the outage? Should Sony offer some sort of compensation? Sound off in the comments…

I think that one thing that can be done for compensation is to restore features that they have removed. For instance, the option to “install other OS” was a major factor in my decision to spend the extra money and by a playstation. So, in a sense I feel that I purchased the option to install another OS when I purchased the PS3.

Further, Sony went after GeoHot in court because GeoHot found a way to restore that perticular feature that Sony removed. Because of this, Sony made a lot of hackers angry. Now, we the users have to further suffer the consequences of Sony’s arrogance, lack of effort in terms of security, and their complete lack of consideration for the people who need to check their credit and freeze credit cards.